Herding IP Cats

A tidy house, a tidy mind they say, and I’ll leave it up to you to consider what being disorganized might mean. Anybody who has tried to manage hundreds of IP addresses using just a sheet of paper or a spreadsheet will probably appreciate some help.

Once a network starts to grow beyond cozy boundaries, it becomes difficult to keep track of all its elements. And, it really doesn’t matter whether you use DHCP to assign your addresses or do the job manually, which is not unusual on server networks.

Without Network Address Translation (NAT) on many LANs, the IPv4 Internet address space would have been exhausted years ago. Still, it’s probably a good idea to check what comes through your NAT connections.